Working Across Borders: What Transfers and What Does Not

Operating in more than one country is not harder than operating in one. It is harder in a specific and predictable way: everything you think is a universal truth about business turns out, on inspection, to be a local convention that you happened to learn first.

I have worked across the United States and Europe, and inside a national tax administration in correspondence with other European administrations, the OECD and the IMF. That combination taught me to sort assumptions into two piles quickly, and sorting them is most of the skill.

What does not transfer

• Timelines. How long a decision "should" take is entirely local. The same three weeks is either normal diligence or an alarming silence depending on where you are standing.
• What silence means. In one market it means no. In another it means the person is doing the work before replying. Reading it wrong destroys more deals than price ever has.
• How much detail is required before a commitment. Some markets commit on the idea and work out the detail afterwards. Others will not commit until the detail exists. Neither side thinks of this as a preference — both think it is simply how business is done.
• What a contract is for. In some places it is the beginning of the relationship, in others the record of one already agreed. Sending the same document into both produces two completely different reactions.
• Regulation. Obviously. But the trap is not the rule you look up — it is the rule you did not know existed because your home market has no equivalent of it.

What transfers completely

Judgement about people is the same everywhere. Whether someone does what they said, whether they raise a problem early or hide it, whether they are curious — none of that has a nationality, and I have never once found a market where it read differently.

Standards transfer. What you consider finished, what you refuse to send. I have never been in a country where careful work was a disadvantage.

And arithmetic transfers absolutely. Margin, overhead, cash. A business that does not work in one country does not work in another, however differently the meeting went. A surprising number of cross-border ventures are actually just weak businesses with a plausible excuse attached.

What institutions taught me about this

Working inside a tax administration, in correspondence with the OECD and the IMF, gives you an unusual view: you see several countries trying to solve the same problem at once, and you see how differently they define the problem before they even begin.

The lesson I took was not about tax. It was that disagreement between two competent parties is very often definitional rather than substantive. They are not disputing the answer. They are answering slightly different questions and neither has noticed.

That happens constantly in cross-border commercial work. Before assuming a counterpart is being difficult, it is worth checking whether they are solving a different problem — a compliance obligation you do not have, an internal approval you cannot see, a norm about who signs first. Most of the time they are.

The practical discipline

Three habits do most of the work, and none of them require expertise in the other market.

Write the assumption down. Before a cross-border engagement, list what you are assuming about timing, detail and decision-making. The act of writing it turns invisible convention into something you can check.

Ask the boring question directly. "What does your side need before this can be agreed, and who signs it?" It sounds unsophisticated. It replaces a month of inference.

Assume good faith for longer than feels comfortable. The distance at which a foreign counterpart looks obstructive is usually the distance at which you cannot yet see their constraint. My rule is to spend one more conversation before concluding anything about a person's intent.

The part I got wrong for years

I used to think working internationally meant becoming adaptable — adjusting my manner to whichever room I was in. There is something to that, but I overdid it, and it made me less useful rather than more.

What people across every market actually want is to know what you are like, and to find that you are the same next time. Consistency travels better than adaptability. Adjust the timing, the detail and the process to the market. Do not adjust your standards, and do not adjust who you are, because the moment a counterpart cannot predict you, distance does the rest.

The costs nobody puts in the plan

Cross-border work carries a set of overheads that never appear in the projection, and they are worth naming because they are entirely predictable.

Everything takes one extra round. Not because anyone is slow, but because a question that would be resolved in a corridor now requires a written exchange, and each exchange crosses a time zone. Build that into timelines from the start and it is manageable. Discover it in month two and every deadline is already wrong.

Second, you will need local knowledge you cannot acquire quickly — not the law, which you can look up, but the convention around the law. Which regulator actually responds. What everybody does in practice. This is why a competent local adviser is not a luxury; it is the cheapest way to buy several years of context.

Third, and least discussed: you become a foreigner in one of your markets. Something you understood instinctively at home now requires deliberate thought. That is tiring in a way that does not show up anywhere, and it is why people operating internationally often make worse decisions in their own market for the first year.

What makes it worth doing anyway

Having two markets removes a category of risk that a single-market business cannot escape: everything happening to you at once. A slowdown, a regulatory change, a shift in demand — these rarely arrive simultaneously on two continents.

But the real return is not risk. It is that seeing two systems solve the same problem differently permanently improves your judgement about both. You stop confusing convention with necessity. Once you have watched something work perfectly well the other way, you can never again be quite as certain that the way you learned first was the way it has to be done — and that scepticism is worth more than the diversification.

Contracts read differently on either side of a border

The same document can be understood in two entirely different ways by two competent parties acting in complete good faith, and neither will realise until something goes wrong.

In some markets a contract is understood as the complete statement of the relationship — if it is not written, it was not agreed. In others it is understood as the record of an understanding, with the relationship carrying the parts nobody wrote down. Send the same agreement into both and one party is reading a specification while the other is reading a summary.

This is where my training genuinely helps — the reading habit that came out of studying tax inside a law faculty. Reading a document for what it says rather than what everyone intends it to say is a specific discipline, and it comes from studying a subject where the words carry the obligation. Across borders that habit is not pedantry — it is the only reliable protection, because the shared assumptions you would normally rely on are exactly what is missing.

The practical version is to write down the things everybody considers too obvious to write down. Who does what if the timeline slips. What counts as finished. Which country's rules apply. In a domestic relationship those are unnecessary. Across a border they are the entire agreement.

Trust is built differently, and on a different clock

In one market I could establish enough trust to begin in two conversations, because the culture treats a good conversation as sufficient basis to try something small. In another, two conversations establish only that we have met.

Neither is better and both are internally consistent. But if you arrive expecting one and receive the other, you will read a normal pace as rejection and start pushing — which is precisely the behaviour that confirms the other side's caution.

What I do now is state the clock explicitly. I will say early that I am not expecting a decision today, that I would rather begin with something small, and that I am comfortable taking time. It sounds almost too simple. It removes most of the misreading, because it tells the other party which set of expectations I am operating under and lets them correct me if it is not theirs.